Homeless people were turned away from emergency shelters Thursday morning despite assurances in recent months to homeless service providers that their clients would be treated the same as other Boulder residents in a citywide emergency such as widespread flooding, Bridge House Executive Director Isabel McDevitt said.

A spokeswoman for the Red Cross said people were turned away, but that was against Red Cross policy and will not happen again.

"Our policy is not to turn people away in life-safety emergencies," Patricia Billinger said. "Someone -- we're not sure who -- did turn people away, but we have corrected that. The shelter manager and people who make decisions about this stuff would never do that."

More than 80 people crowded Thursday morning into the 1,200-square-foot carriage house behind First Congregational Church in downtown Boulder that houses Bridge House's main offices to seek shelter from the rain and high water.

Response system

McDevitt said Bridge House and BOHO, which operates emergency warming shelters with church and synagogue partners in Boulder, have been working with city and county emergency management for about six months to develop an emergency response system to protect the city's homeless population. In fact, a meeting was scheduled for Thursday to finalize those plans.

Throughout those meetings, McDevitt said she was told that homeless people would be treated the same as other residents in case of flooding. However, when Bridge House sent clients to the Red Cross shelter at the YMCA at 28th Street and Mapleton Avenue, they were turned away because they were not previously housed.

McDevitt said she called both city and county officials, who told her that was "totally unacceptable."

McDevitt said that the situation developed very quickly Wednesday night. If Bridge House staff had realized at 3 p.m. how bad the flooding would be or even how much rain would fall, they would have stayed open later and maintained better contact with clients.

There is simply no way to know if everyone is safe, she said.

"It's very scary," McDevitt said. "It's quite possible that people were exposed to conditions that will make them very sick, or God forbid, someone drowned. We don't know what's happened in the mountains."

Many homeless people camp in the canyons west of Boulder.

McDevitt said this time of year, homeless people and service providers worry more about early cold, not flooding, which is seen as a summer problem.

Emergency shelters

BOHO did open emergency shelters in two churches Wednesday night, but with very short notice, not many people knew about them.

And one of those churches flooded and had to be evacuated.

"It's been rugged," said BOHO board member Bill Sweeney. "A lot of people who thought they could tough it out found themselves lying in water in the middle of the night."

BOHO planned to open Thursday at Congregation Har Hashem on Baseline Road, but had to move to St. Aiden's Episcopal Church, near Folsom Field, because of flooding on Baseline.

The Boulder Shelter for the Homeless is not usually open this time of year, except for people in the transitional program, and did not open Wednesday night. However, the shelter opened 50 beds Thursday night for people who are sober. Executive Director Greg Harms said the shelter does not have sufficient staff this time of year to open its entire facility.

McDevitt said service providers to the homeless have plans in place for emergencies that primarily affect their clients, such as extreme heat or cold, but widespread flooding is beyond their capacity to handle alone.

"It would be different if this were an emergency just for our clients," she said. "We're just trying to use our resources to the maximum capacity to help people, but this is an emergency way beyond the capacity of the nonprofit community."

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